Forget Work/Life Balance
Work/life balance is the wrong way to think about it. Taking back life and hobbies and leisure and uninterrupted family time and disconnected vacations doesn’t need balance – it demands boundaries.
Three Pre-Conditions for Successful Collaboration
Collaboration is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Review of the three pre-conditions for successful collaboration, and some comments on an article about interactional frequency in work design.
Collaboration Has Significant Downsides
Collaboration is not without its problems. Talk about collaboration focuses almost exclusively on the first definition of collaboration—“people working with other people to achieve a common outcome”—and ignores the second—“traitorous cooperation with an enemy, usually an occupying force.” Both are valid definitions. A brief consideration of nine downsides of collaboration.
Creating Space for Collaboration
Where there is space for discussion without a foregone conclusion, ideation without rigid boundaries, and exploration without the demand for alignment with the firm’s ossified methodology, people can flourish in their collaborations.
#XED is Essential for #DEX
DEX, or Digital Employee Experience, is the new thing to orient around. The term “intranets” has been deprecated for a while, and even the term digital workplace could become last year’s idea. Leveraging the ideas of customer experience (CX) to address employee issues, DEX offers a new way […]
Improving Things for Knowledge and Information Workers
Knowledge and information workers don’t produce physical product. They are paid to use their brains – leveraging a domain of knowledge, ways of thinking, ways of approaching a problem, ways of creating solutions to problems, and so on. There’s a mental process at the core of how such […]
Backlash Against Group Chat
Group chat offers a particular approach to communication between people, characterised by rapid fire interaction, short sentences or thought fragments, and a fun and lively tone. This approach has several implications, such as: The conversation space tends toward chaos, disjointedness, and dis-organisation. People weigh in on multiple, simultaneous […]
Don’t Get to Perfect Too Soon
Getting to perfect too soon reduces the available space for collaboration. Perfection signals that the current effort is good enough or refined enough, and that the opportunity for input, direction, crazy ideas, left-field thinking, new ways of looking at a problem and the like has gone. For instance, […]
Distractions at the Office Mean That Remote Workers Outperform
Brian writes about why remote workers outperform office workers: … one study found that the number of people who say they cannot concentrate at their desk has increased by 16 percent since 2008. Also startling: The number of workers who say they do not have access to quiet […]
Conversations for Understanding – the Amway RealTalk Approach
Claire from Amway explains their RealTalk initiative to create the context for people to talk about difficult subjects without trying to “win” the conversation. The overall intent was to improve the culture at Amway. A few key points: – People were encouraged to participate with a positive intent, […]
Michael Sampson 
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